Call for Papers – ‘Performing Ecos’

Contributions are invited for a special themed peer-reviewed journal issue of Performing Ethos

Deadline for Proposals: 15 August 2014

Guest-Editors: Bronwyn Preece (Independant Artist/Scholar), Jess Allen (University of Manchester) and Stephen Bottoms (University of Manchester).

Special Issue
17571979Global climate change is catalysing an examination of ecological ethics: humanity’s continuing failure to respond meaningfully to the impending environmental crisis has been characterized by philosopher Stephen M. Gardiner as a ‘perfect moral storm’ (2011). How are these ethical imperatives currently being addressed through, or as, performance? This edition aims to examine critically how ecological ethics and ethos may be supporting and challenging the current range of practices. ‘Performing Ecos’ will be an international interrogation of where the dynamic interdisciplinary field now situates itself in relation to Una Chaudhuri’s provocative and catalysing 1994 statement that Western theatre, being humanist-centred, is largely anti-ecological. Chaudhuri’s article, one of the first to acknowledge this philosophical dilemma, has been pivotal in stimulating both critical and performance responses from a wide range of scholarly perspectives. This special themed journal will be among the first specifically to unpack and foreground the ethos and ethics that now underpin performance and/as ecology. The journal will be published in Autumn 2015, and seeks to collate an international response to the following questions:

• How are contemporary performance practices being critically challenged by an ecological ethos? How does ‘ecology’ challenge how performance theorists think about ‘ethics’?

• How is ecological performance resisting – or further entrenching – binaries between rural/urban, nature/culture, metaphor/material, local/global?

• What are the ethics of framing climate change and other geophysical processes in terms of performance? (e.g. Kershaw 2012)

• How are indigenous voices and values being incorporated or appropriated through ecological performance? Are our ‘ethics’ being conceived and scribed with the same multivocality that they espouse?

• Is ecological performance cultivating, reinforcing or challenging a gendered aesthetic?

• How do the aesthetics of ecological performance differ across practices (ecocritical, site-specific, activist) and across continents?

Proposal Submissions
Contributors are invited to consider the above questions in practice-based contexts, as well as in theoretical and philosophical terms. We are inviting contributions in a diversity of presentation formats, from formal papers to artists’ pages. Articles should be between 5000-7000 words (Artist Pages do not necessarily need to conform to this designation). Accompanying photographs are encouraged.

Please send a 300-500 word abstract by 15 August 2014 to Bronwyn Preece: improvise@bronwynpreece.com. Please include a 100-word biographical statement with your submission. Selected submissions will be due by 31 October 2014, and final drafts will be selected at the end of May 2015. Performing Ethos uses the Harvard citation style.

Submissions must comply with the Intellect Journal Style Guide.

Performing Ethos is a refereed, interdisciplinary journal which considers ethical questions relating to contemporary theatre and live performance. Global in scope, it provides a unique forum for rigorous scholarship and serious reflection on the ethical dimensions of a wide range of performance practices from the politically and aesthetically radical to the mainstream Performing Ethos: ‘Performing Ecos’ will include book reviews. Additionally, this special issue will include a centre-spread, which will include a 100-word reflective response from contributors to the same question: what is YOUR ethic of performance and/as ecology?

References
Chaudhuri, U. (1994), ‘There Must be A Lot of Fish in that Lake: Toward an Ecological Theater’, Theater, 25: 1, pp. 23-31.
Gardiner, S. (2011), A Perfect Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, New York: OUP.
Kershaw, B. (2012), ‘‘This is the Way the World Ends, Not…?’ On Performance Compulsion and Climate Change’, Performance Research, 17: 4, pp. 5-17.

Download the PEET Notes for Contributors

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